Tuesday, June 4, 2013

Shards To A Whole: Chapter 112

McGee centric character study/romance. Want to start at the beginning? Click here.

Chapter 112: The Reception

“Ziva’s going to want to get changed, too,” Abby says as
they walk into the bedroom of the suite at the hotel.

The plan was finish up the formal photos, head back to the
hotel, get changed into the less formal reception costumes, and then party
time. Palmer and Breena had been nice enough to give Tony and Ziva a lift, and
the wink Palmer gave Tim made him pretty sure they’d drive slow, which meant
Tim and Abby had had his car to themselves. And he probably set the land speed
record from the church to the hotel.

Tim grins at her, shutting the door to the bedroom, or as Breena
had called it, ‘the good light room’, locking it, pressing her against it, saying,
“They can wait. I’ve got you all to myself, Mrs. McGee, and I intend to take
advantage of it.”

“It or me?”

“Both!”

He steps back, and turns her away from him, kissing her
neck, and starting on the line of tiny buttons down the back of her dress.

“I get why they call them bodice rippers. This is
impossible!”

Her eyes are wide as she looks over her shoulder at him. “Don’t
rip it! I really like this dress and want to keep it.”

“Then you better hope I can get this off in the next two
minutes, because I’m going to go crazy if I can’t.” He’s nipping wet kisses
down the part of her back he has managed to get exposed, about the top three
inches.

She reaches behind her, cupping him through his trousers,
and gives him a firm squeeze. “God, Abby, that’s not helping my concentration.”

She laughs, joy and happiness bubbling out, gently squeezes
him again, and then lets go, starting on the buttons on her sleeves.

His fingers yank at the buttons, forcing them through their
holes fast, and in less than two minutes he did get the bodice off. Tim tosses
it aside, pushing the straps of her shift down, kissing her shoulder while he
starts on the knots holding up her skirt.

“Who tied this for you?”

“Jimmy.”

“Palmer is evil. Pure unadulterated evil.”

“Why?”

“Screw this.” Tim grabs the small knife he’s got in his
keychain and begins to cut through the ties on the dress and bustle. “Triple
knots. Tiny, little, impossible to untie, triple knots.”

Abby giggles as her skirt falls to the floor. The bustle and
hoops join it a second later.

For a moment, Tim stops to just look at her. White, button
up, high-heeled, ankle boots, pure white stockings, a white shift skimming from
her thighs to her shoulders, and a white corset, embroidered with tiny, blue
roses. His eyes drift to the tattoo he
put on her arm, and the ring on her finger, and to her stomach, still flat
under the corset but not for all that much longer, and that insane rush of MINE
that Palmer had talked about hit him like a hammer to the skull.

His hand drew up her leg, looking to tug panties off, and
found bare skin.

“Oh, that’s so hot!”

She grins at him. “I thought it was possible we might find a
time to do this.”

It’s fast. It has to be, Ziva and Tony are going to be up soon,
and while the potential to get caught adds to the thrill, actually getting
caught isn’t something either of them want.

And happy. They both keep laughing between hot, wet kisses
and soft, muted groans.

Tim thought he’d seen every version of Abby’s orgasm face,
but this one, a mix of smile and pleasure so sharp it almost hurt blows him
away.

He’s standing on shaky legs, breathing hard, enjoying his
own post-orgasmic tingles and the soft aftershocks of hers, forehead on her
shoulder when he looks up at her and says, “We should make a habit of this.”

“This?”

“Up-against-the-wall quickies at weddings. Definitely need
to slip off during Tony and Ziva’s.”

“I’ll be five months pregnant then.”

“Oh God, you will.” His eyes light up as he imagines her
five months pregnant. “You’ll be all soft and round and curvy. And we will
definitely have to do this. Tony and Ziva’s wedding, no panties for you!”

She giggles at that. His hand closes on her breast and he
kisses gently, then her shoulder and neck.

“I can just see it. Soft round breasts, soft round belly,
God, you’ll have to beat me off with a stick to keep me away from you when you’re
five months pregnant.”

“Beat you off with a stick? We’ve never tried a stick
before, but I suppose I can do that. What are you thinking, a long thin rod,
like a pointer, or a branch from a tree?”

He laughs, head back, eyes closed, joy just bubbling out.

“We can figure that out then.” He leans his forehead against
hers. “You know what?”

She kisses the tip of his nose. “What?”

“We got married!”

She’s smiling, eyes bright. “Yeah, we did.” They hear the
door to the suite open followed by Tony and Ziva’s voices. She kisses him again, arms around his neck. “And
now we’ve got to get changed and act appropriate.”

He twists and reaches, just able to grab the box of tissues
on the dresser. “There’s one thing to be said for condoms,” he says, voice
quiet. “The clean-up for this last time was a bit easier.”

“Yeah, but this time you’ll know that I’m wet with you for
the rest of the wedding.”

His eyes went wide. “I hadn’t thought about it. But now I
am. I’m going to have a hard-on in all the wedding photos.”

“Creative cropping should take care of that.”

He starts to giggle again as he wipes up and she heads to
the bathroom.

Tony knocks on the door. “You two decent?”

“Almost.” Tim opens the window, realizing the room has to
smell like sex. Oh well, they notice, they notice. Not like they didn’t just
get married.

He didn’t have a whole lot of changing to do. He pulls up
his pants and tucks his shirt back in, making sure the vest was straight, then
swapped out his ascot for a loosely tied black cravat and his spats for
boots. A black frock coat replaced the
morning jacket, and though he had intended to mess up his hair, Abby had
already taken care of that. Gloves off, post sex glow, mussed hair: he looked
properly rakish.

Abby comes out of the bathroom a minute later and turns her
back to him. “Help me out?”

“Oh yeah.” He unties her corset, and she slips out of the
shift, leaving her naked save for the stockings and boots.

He was stroking her back, pulling her closer to him when she
says, quietly, “They’re in the next room.”

“Then don’t make a lot of noise,” he whispers, grinning,
turning her in his arms and kneels down. He lightly kisses her belly and then
inches lower to her pussy, for a soft, wet, and much too quick kiss. “If I have
to walk around knowing you’re wet with my cum, you get to know that you’re on
my lips.”

She pulls him up and kisses him soundly, licking herself off
of him. Granted the groom doesn’t get kissed nearly as often as the bride does,
but still, he’s likely to be kissing other people tonight, and that’s a bit too
much of an advertisement of what they’ve been up to. “Come on, we need to get dressed.”

The white stockings stay. So do the boots. She steps into a
ruffled black and white skirt that falls from mid-left thigh to her right calf.
Over that goes something that looks like a cross between a tank top and a
corset. It has shoulder straps like a tank, but the snug fit, light boning, and
lace up front of a corset. And, this tickles Tim to no end, it’s leather, white
leather. She adds a small white top hat, with a tiny white lace veil, pinning
it to her hair, and checks her makeup, swapping out the light pink lipstick she
had worn during the ceremony for a red stain finishes her look.

“Ready?” she asks.

“I think so.” He checks himself in the mirror one last time,
making sure he didn’t have any lipstick on his neck or a semen stain on his
trousers, but he appears to be all put together.

His hand is on the door when she said, “Wait!”

“What?”

“Garter.”

“Oh.” She heads to one of the bags on the bed, shuffles
around in it for a moment, and finds a circlet of red lace and black satin. She
tosses it to him. “Put it on me?”

“Thought I was supposed to take it off.”

“You’ll do that, too.”

He grins, promises of sexy fun in his eyes. “Oh, yes, I
will.”

She holds out her right leg, and he slips it up, making sure
it’s nicely snug around her thigh. “Good?”

“Yep.” She kisses him one last time.

So, about five minutes after Tony and Ziva got there, he
opened the door, both of them looking significantly more playful, relaxed, and
mildly flushed than they had half an hour earlier when they had last seen them.

Tony takes one look at them and says, “You’ve been married
for five minutes! You couldn’t have waited until after we needed to use that
room?”

Which causes both of them to collapse into a giggling heap.

Five minutes later, while Ziva was getting changed, and Abby
and Tim were sitting on the sofa, snuggling, the rest of the wedding party
found their way up to the Bridal suite.

Jimmy grinned at them. “Gibbs finally shot the photographer
with a tranquilizer dart, and we were able to get free. The guests are
downstairs, munching away and mingling. DJ says that as soon as we’re ready for
the grand entrance, he is as well.”

“Just waiting on Tony and Ziva,” Abby answered.

Which was when Ziva stepped out, looking sleek, cool, and
dangerous in her gunfighter costume. “Not anymore.”

“For the first time in public, Mr. and Mrs. Tim McGee!” The
DJ’s words echoed through the ballroom, followed by the first notes of their
first song together. Tim wrapped Abby in his arms, feeling her body, soft and
warm against his, letting the music move through them, and the rest of the
world slid away as they danced.

He was singing along and didn’t care how stupid he might
have looked doing it. She was smiling at him, eyes warm and filled with joy,
and he was just so exultantly in love at that moment.

When the music shifted to You Shook Me (All Night Long) and
the other couples joined them, some of them looking pretty shocked at this
music choice, he began to laugh, just to let the joy out. She laughed with him
as they danced close and sexy, and he thinks this might be the heart of love,
the ability to laugh together while wanting each other. That sex and joy and
humor should all be one big ball of good.

Or maybe not.

But it felt really good, so he wasn’t going to argue with
it.

One of the ways Tim can tell nervous from excited is that
nervous makes him want to eat all the time and excited kills his appetite.

There was food. It smelled good. He ate about two bites of
it. It was probably tasty, but he didn’t really notice.

But eating gives everyone a chance to just settle back,
relax, focus on something pleasant.

He felt very outside himself. He was enjoying watching
everyone he loved having a good time, but there was still a very deep
surreality to it.

Like, he sat there, chatting with Palmer for a few minutes,
almost feeling normal, and then it would come back in a massive wave, they just
got married, and he’d have to touch Abby, kiss her, find the ground again, and
then there’d be another few minutes of normal while he watched her eat, or
listened to Tony tease Ziva, or something like that, and then he’d feel the
ring on his finger or see the one on hers, and another swamping wave of married
would hit him.

She saw it hit him, and took his hand in hers gently,
caressed his face, and leaned over to kiss his ear and whisper, “I love you,
Tim.”

He kissed her back. “Love you, too.”

Then she took her fork, pierced a piece of the salmon on his
plate, and fed it to him. “Have you eaten a real meal today?”

He thought about that and shrugged, honestly not sure.

Once more she leaned over to whisper into his ear. “I’ve got
plans for tonight, and they aren’t going to happen if you pass out from low
blood sugar. Eat.”

So he did.

When a solider gets married, he uses his dress saber to cut
the cake. Tim supposes the equivalent for him would be shooting the cupcakes with his
service pistol, but that would just be messy. And besides, they’re cupcakes,
not too much reason to cut them.

He knew which sort of cupcake she liked the best. The
almond-cherry ones. And they were awfully tasty. He found one of them, the
pale, cream colored frosting with two almonds and a cherry on top let him know
he had the right kind, peeled back the paper, and fed her a bite of it.

She licked the frosting off her lip, found a tiramisu one,
and like him, peeled back the paper, and offered him his cupcake.

He took her wrist in his hand and kissed the fingers holding
the cupcake, then took his bite.

Abby was dancing with Gibbs when Tony came over to him and
said, “You’re ghostwriting my vows.”

“No!”

“Please. I will never, ever sound that good on my own.”

“Yeah, and it just about killed me to come up with them. Get
your own vows.”

“I’ll pay you.”

“You can’t afford me!”

“Try me.”

Tim was almost tempted to actually tell Tony how much he
gets paid to write, (At one point, while he was procrastinating, he worked out,
based on his hourly rate, how much his vows cost. $3,472) but decided against
it. “No. I’ve plotted out entire novels in less time than it took me to come up
with them. I don’t have hours to sit around thinking about your vows.”

“Look, I’ll end up sounding like Palmer if I do it on my
own. Worse, I’ll sound like the stuff Palmer cut out of his vows because it was
too goofy.”

Tim was singularly unmoved by that plea.

“If I write a rough draft, will you at least help?”

Tim smiled. “That I will do.”

A thought occurred to Tim as the DJ announced the garter
toss. Abby wasn’t wearing panties. She saw the quick flash of panic on his face
and grinned at him, sitting down, quickly crossing her legs, and then extending
her right leg, toe pointed.

That worked. He grinned back up at her, kissed her knee,
eased it off, and then whipped it right at Tony’s head. Sheer reflex alone
meant Tony caught it before he was even aware of the fact it was coming at him.

For a second he just stared at it in his hand, and then he
broke out laughing, folded it up carefully, and tucked it into the pocket of
Ziva’s coat.

Jimmy got him alone as the party was starting to wind down.

“You don’t ever get to rag on me about being too sappy
again.”

Tim raised one eyebrow.

“You were singing along to her with your first dance.”

“Singing along to The Troggs, quietly, in her ear, not
serenading her with Bette Midler’s greatest hit.”

Jimmy grinned and shook his head. “The only reason you weren’t
serenading her is because you can’t sing.”

“Un huh. Keep telling yourself that. I was doing fine with
the Troggs.”

“The Troggs can’t sing, either. Wind Beneath My Wings is
technically challenging and actually requires vocal skill. And if you could
have done something like that you would have.”

Tim laughed, aware of the fact that Palmer is probably
right, but not about to say it. “No, I wouldn’t have because they’d have to tap
me every spring to let the sap out if I did.”

“The addition of guitars and British accents does not lessen
the sap factor. ‘I feel it in my toes.’“

Tim shoved Jimmy a little. “I nailed my vows.”

Jimmy smiled. “Yeah, you did.”

“And there was nothing even remotely sappy about the second
song, so that balanced things out nicely.”

“If you say so.”

They stood there for a moment, watching Abby dance with
Jackson and Breena with Ducky. “So, I noticed that Abby didn’t actually drink
any of the champagne after Tony’s toast.”

Tim nodded.

“When did you find out?”

Tim grinned. “Yesterday morning.”

“You get it now?”

Tim nodded again. “Yeah, I do. I almost killed you last
night. And you’re right, it’s completely insane. My hand was in a fist, ready
to hit, just at the idea that you might have... And at no point did my brain
have any input on the subject. It was just sitting back and watching like it
was a TV show. Never even imagined I could feel this way about someone.”

Palmer smirked happily at him. “It’ll get worse when you can
actually see her body start to change. And, from what I can tell, it doesn’t go
away.”

Tim thought about that. “Breena’s pretty much been pregnant
or nursing for the last year and a half. So I think that’s sort of what you’re
designed to do at this point. Protect your woman and kids.”

“Probably. So, who all knows?”

“You and Gibbs. Maybe Ziva. If you noticed Abby not
drinking, she probably did, too.”

Jimmy shook his head. “Both of the girls have to know. No
way they went out last night and they didn’t notice.”

“Good point.”

“But you told Gibbs”

“Yeah, yesterday.”

“How’d he take it?”

“He hugged me.”

“Wow.”

“Yeah.”

“He hugs guys?”

“He does today. Ducky hugged you when you told him about Breena,
right?”

“Yeah, he did, both times. But he’s not... Well, he’s not
Gibbs.”

“True. When did you tell him? I mean with Molly.” Tim had
been there when they made the announcement for the new baby, and honestly, just
about everyone hugged both of them, though if he remembered correctly Gibbs did
slap Palmer on the back rather than hug him.

“About two hours after we found out. He had to ask me for a
scalpel three times, and I still hadn’t given it to him, so he finally turned
to me and asked me what was so pressing that I could not be bothered to pay
attention to the poor murdered man on the table, so I told him, and he seemed
to think being distracted was an appropriate response.”

“I’m really glad I’m not on duty for two more weeks. That’s
enough time to get used to this, a little at least.”

Jimmy just grinned at him. “A little.”

Talking with Jimmy made Tim realize that if he didn’t get a
move on, Tony was, once again, going to be left out of their big news, and
probably wouldn’t be happy about it.

He cut in on Abby dancing with Luca, and let her know what
was going on.

She rested her head on his shoulder, not only was it
comfortable, and sweet, but it also let her speak to him easily, without
everyone seeing what they were talking about.

“Yeah, told Breena and Ziva last night. Had to. We had
planned to go dancing and drinking, and the drinking thing wasn’t going to
happen.”

His lips were pressed to her temple. “Okay. I’d like to tell
Tony, so he doesn’t feel left out.”

“Good idea.”

They continued swaying together through the rest of that
song, and the next one, (Can’t Help Falling in Love, the original Elvis
version) and then he broke off to find Tony.

He was talking with Gibbs, good. Tim didn’t have a plan for
what to do if, say, Senior or Luca or someone had been there.

“Hey.”

Tony stared at him. “You’re looking really serious.”

Tim smiled. He’d been doing it so much today his cheeks felt
sore. “Not serious, well, I guess it is, important mostly.”

“What?”

“This is just for the immediate family: you guys, Ziva, and
the Palmers. Don’t want it getting spread around, yet.”

If the grin on his face was any hint, Tony knew what was
coming next.

“Abby’s pregnant.”

Next thing he knew he was being hugged, pounded on the back,
and Tony was saying, “This is great!” Then he pulled back, turned, and stared
at Gibbs, who found his wallet and handed Tony a hundred dollar bill.

Gibbs shrugged. “He didn’t think you’d make it to the
wedding. I did.”

Tim snorted and then full on laughed. “This is what you two do when I’m not
around?”

Gibbs smiled. Tony said, “Among other things.”

The bouquet toss at a wedding with three adolescent girls is
something to behold. Kayla, Harper, and Emily were really intensely interested
in ending up with that bouquet. Really.

Sarah stood a few feet away from them, next to Penny, and
Luca’s girlfriend. Penny was saying something about patriarchal marriage
expectations, but Sarah had dragged her over none-the-less.

Tim didn’t know if Abby intentionally tossed the bouquet at
his grandma. But he does know it’s a good thing the old lady is a great catch
and fast on her feet, because she was able to snag the flowers out of the air
before they hit the ground and side-step Harper Sciuto who almost tackled her
in her effort to get them.

And he didn’t miss the way Ducky winked at her as she stood
there holding them, looking like she can’t believe she’s got them.

Eventually it was getting onto ten. Not terribly late,
especially not for them, but it’s been a long day, and as Abby said, they’ve
got plans for the night.

They left the hotel under a shower of bubbles and headed for
his car, and from there, home and life as Mr. and Mrs. McGee.